Dawn of the Dead (1978) 4K

I appreciate that you vacuumed before you took those pictures, Dobby. I really hate it when exclusive website photos of BD cases are taken and someone has clearly not properly vacuumed, or--worse, IMO--just dust-busted the carpet. Like we true BD case aficionados cannot tell the difference between a proper vacuum and a handheld dust-buster. Come on!

I appreciate that you vacuumed before you took those pictures, Dobby. I really hate it when exclusive website photos of BD cases are taken and someone has clearly not properly vacuumed, or--worse, IMO--just dust-busted the carpet. Like we true BD case aficionados cannot tell the difference between a proper vacuum and a handheld dust-buster. Come on!

I looked at a few other caps, and the one of Ken Foree pointing the assault rifle looks like the natural film grain was somehow transformed into digital noise. It just washes out everything. I am not stickler, but this particular transfer is a mess.

I just received this. I put the 4K disc on with the hopes that people were nitpicking screenshots. I hoped that their TV's just weren't calibrated. Well, looks like my TV is calibrated just fine. I think the Italian translation for "restoration" and "aberration" must be similar. This 4K disc looks good at times and then turns to shit, all within the same shot!

Perhaps the full frame and extras discs will be decent, otherwise this is a bust for me since I own the Happinet set. I have over 20 releases of this film from laserdisc to now 4K (sort of). The definitive collection is unquestionably the Anchor Bay Ultimate Edition DVD set. I wouldn't bother with any blu-ray set, even the OOP Arrow release at its current price.

He goes a little into depth about the issue of certain frames looking fantastic followed by flat frames without details, calling it I-Frame Pulsing. It looks to be a matter of high compression, with the key frames being low compression with great details and the follow up frames that use it as a template being highly compressed so they have low details. Which is too bad because those key frames show that the final restoration master was up to par.

Watching it on my plasma I was fairly happy with it over all. It's been a long while since I've seen Dawn and I've never seen the European cut so ignorance is bliss I guess. Besides the red florescent light the color palette looked great to me; which doesn't make sense admittedly. And based on what Kentai can tell the black levels and highlights are accurate to the materials; although they could have juiced the black levels. So this becomes something of a Rorschach Test on us. Unfortunately anything short of Romero going frame by frame and confirming for the world to see how his film should look, there will always be debate.

Fortunately for me this is my first Blu-ray purchase of Dawn and it appears the remaining Cuts are all duplicates of what's out there. So I guess I have the best of what we have on offer. I doubt Rubenstein is going to work anything out anytime soon by the sound of what I'm hearing.

With Day looking mediocre too we can only hope the upcoming restoration of Night will turn the corner on Romero's films on Blu-ray.

While it looks to be a better scan detail-wise, the framing may potentially be off as it's opened up quite a bit (which may be the full frame and not DOP-intended) and it does look quite dark. We're all best to wait for the upcoming UK Second Sight release, or whatever else officially comes to North America after.